Everything about Star Trek: Discovery has screamed “trainwreck.” But this latest nugget tells me that the people behind the show are actively trying to sabotage it. Is it possible that at some point the producers of the show realized they had a disaster and rather than going to the considerable expense of scrapping and retooling, or just plain scrapping, they decided to make it an unwinnable suckfest? Is there some Hollywood-advantage in making it so bad that the studio pulls the plug with extreme prejudice?

President Barack Obama was the best salesman the AR-15 ever saw. Gun owners were justifiably afraid that he and his fellow travelers, the likes of Pelosi and Boxer and the rest of the civilian disarmament fetishists, would pass laws banning the purchase or even ownership of a perfectly good rifle. Fortunately, reason for once prevailed.

A few weeks ago I went to a gun show south of Salt Lake city. It has been a year or more since i went to the last one, and at the time the chances seemed fair that the Obama years would be followed by the Hillary years. The gun show *then* was busy, packed with both sellers and buyers. The one a few weeks ago? Much smaller, about 2/3 the number of sellers, far fewer buyers. The panic is over.

So it seems that for at least the next few years, AR-15s should be had for reasonable prices, calmly, and without any fuss.

But now there’s a new item of political relevance: anything with MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) printed on it. This Trump campaign motto has become a new boogeyman for the Left, with people losing their fargin; minds when they see someone daring to wear such a thing. Behold:

Pretty much what the title says. Rather astonishingly, though, the school administration has come down on the side of the *two* students that the math teacher freaked out at, and not only allowed the students to wear their shirts, but gave the teacher an undefined talkin’-to.

INSANE!!

High school teacher calls Trump shirt a "swastika" and makes him take it off in class!

Me, I was never all that impressed with MAGA. But it’s things like this that make me *want* to pick up a MAGA hat. The difficulty for that little fantasy of mine is that people around *here* are generally pretty reasonable, and even though many might not like Trump and may not have voted for him (as I didn’t), they’re unlikely to go all Antifa-crap on anyone wearing a MAGA hat or shirt.

Still, I have high hopes and actual expectations that when the teacher in this story returned to her classroom the next day, or tomorrow perhaps, that she’ll be met with a sea of MAGA shirts.

Such as here:

I don’t know the background here, but the teacher here gives *every* indication of being the actual source of the problem.

This is kinda long (for 21st century short attention span definitions of “long”), but it’s also really, really good. If you want a vision of the future loaded with unthinking left-wing violence… here ya go: Antifa and allies physically assaulting (and Dem politicians slandering) non-white folks for being Nazis.

Tiny, you might have guessed, is named ironically. He’s a 6′6″, 345-lb. Samoan. His favorite food, he says, “is food.” Grabbing a bear-paw’s worth of his own flesh, he says, “I ain’t fat, I’m stab-resistant.”

That’s funny, right there. This is less funny, but much more important:

“We can’t just shut up, just be quiet, and let this evil continue. The darkness continues to get bigger and bigger in our country, and it will be gone. The country will burn, I’m telling you, if we don’t do things to stand up against it. We all take it for granted. We take for granted everything that we have. That’s why we have to wake up and understand. Goddamn, we have too much to lose.” His eyes well as he takes a long pause, looking out on the shimmering San Francisco Bay. “We can’t stand by, we’ve gotta stand up. And we’ve got to do it together, or it’s gonna be gone.”

Any liberals, Democrats, leftists and such reading this blog: if you ever want to be intellectually honest, give this piece a read, and some serious thought. You want to lay the Nazis on the doorstep of right wingers? Fine. These people are *your* problem. And there’s a hell of a lot more of them than there are Nazilarpers.

Remember how Trump caused a ruckus by saying that there were troublemakers on “both sides?” And how a whole lot of people started screeching that one side was the Nazis, and the other side was the “anti-hate” peaceful protesters?

The link is a perfect example of TL:DR, but it basically boils down to “Lenin, Stalin and Mao were Teh Awesome, an we need to follow in their footsteps and bring bloodshed to the streets.” The “Red Guards Austin is an autonomous Marxist-Leninist-Maoist collective based in Austin, TX.”

So keep in mind: yes, on one side you have people who think the Nazis were great. The Nazis, who killed something like 20 million people. On the other side, you have people who think the Commies were great. The Commies, who murdered a hundred million people and who pointed nuclear weapons at *us.*

First they went after the confederates. Then the Founding Fathers. Now Columbus.

What they are trying to do is erase western civilization, to replace it with some utopian socialist system based on some fraudulent idea of “justice” that has as much reality as Atlantis. What they’ll end up doing it getting more people like Trump elected, and very likely getting a whole lot of people injured and killed as they try to bring about their little revolution.

You want to take down monuments to Confederates? I’m right there with you. Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee were villains who took up arms not in the cause of freedom but to perpetuate and spread slavery. But when you go after Washington and Lincoln and Columbus? Screw you, buddy. You’re moving people like me into the “very definitely against *you*” category. How do you think it’s going to turn out when you’ve set the majority of the country at your throats? When you’ve done such a fantastic job of dividing politics into Us vs. Them and then made sure to alienate the majority into the Them category?

It’s one thing to tear down statues of Stalin and Saddam when their regimes come down. It’s quite another to tear down historic monuments to your nations heroes. And what these little pissants don’t seem to recognize is that if they normalize the destruction of historical artifacts, then *their* favorite things become fair play.

The fallout from the National Socialists Vs. Socialist Socialists kerfuffle in Virginia continues. One event was a group of people pulled down a 90+ year old statue of a Confederate soldier in Durham, North Carolina. This is one of those “yeah, but on the other hand” sort of things.

On the one hand, monuments to the Confederates are akin to the Germans setting up monuments to their wartime military. The Confederates were losers in every sense of the word… they were fighting for an immoral and fundamentally doomed cause and they were fighting a bigger, richer, more powerful and industrialized neighbor who effectively surrounded them. Even had they won their independence the CSA is unlikely to have long survived as their cultural basis was weak at best and they now had no way to retain states that decided to go their own way. And, of course, they were losers because they *lost.* Waving Confederate flags proudly always struck me as being on the same level as proudly displaying your straight-F report cards, or the arrest record of your idiot grandfather who was a drunkard and an incompetent bootlegger.

On the other hand… tearing down statues that YOU DON’T OWN is necessarily criminal. If you were to do this and get away with it – and if you read the article, there are people DEMANDING that those arrested be given amnesty – then if the statue is replaced by something you *do* approve of, then someone else can come along and tear *that* down.

But here’s the real head-scratcher – the name of the person arrested: Taqiyah Thompson.

Taqiyah?

That’s, ummm… a little strange. I’m not sure if it’s ironic or on the nose to be named after the Islamic principle that it’s ok to lie to non-Muslims for religious purposes (some claim that it’s only ok to do so when they are in immanent danger of bodily harm, but then they also claim that “Jihad” is only about a spiritual struggle within yourself, not blowing yourself and a whole bunch of innocent bystanders to bits).

Also, who is Taqiyah associated with? Why, the Workers World Party, of course! These folks aren’t “Socialist,” they are all about Marxist-Leninist Communism. Of Course they are. How adorable to complain about the evils of the Confederacy while supporting the evils of Communism, a system that enslaved and murdered many more millions than the CSA ever dreamed of.

I’ve heard a lot of hysterical screeching since January that the US today is “a lot like 1930’s Germany.” Yeah, but it’s not. A far closer analogy would be *1920’s* Germany, which saw the rise of Fascism as a response to the Communists, with street battles between national socialists and outright communists. *THAT* seems like about where we are these days. So, congrats, Workers World Party and fellow travelers: like your ancestors of 90 years ago, your idiocy has helped foster an equally idiot fascist response.

I can’t really blame the people in the video for being so twisted up. They are themselves victims… not of an evil racist America, but of a great many people – in the media, in the pulpits, in the government – who make bank off convincing people that they are oppressed, and that the way to deal with it is to keep themselves down.

The far left went buggo under Bush, but has gone truly insane under Trump. With calls for violence against “Nazis,” and redefining “Nazi” to mean anyone not on the far Left, it was only a matter of time before people like the fascists in Antifa and similar groups decided to step it up from simply assaulting people in the street to gunning people down. Well, here we are.

The shooter in this case was a dedicated Bernie Sanders supporter and vehemently anti-Trumper.

And because in this era of social media Everything Must Be About Me, I found these quotes especially interesting:

I met him on the Bernie trail in Iowa, worked with him in the Quad Cities area.”

Orear described Hodgkinson as a “quiet guy” who was “very mellow, very reserved” when they stayed overnight at a Sanders’s supporter home in Rock Island, Ill., after canvassing for the senator.

Yup. Home town area. Joy.

Remember during the 2008 campaign when Jared Joughner shot and injured a Democratic Representative (and *killed* a republican judge, but never mind him), the Dems and the media went through the roof blaming it on Sarah Palin and her supposed rhetoric? it’ll be interesting to see if they do the same here. In fact, I kinda expect they will: in 2008, they blamed Republicans for violence against a Dem. Now, I expect they’ll *still* blame Republicans (specifically Trump, I’ll bet) for this violence. But even if they don’t blame Republicans specifically, they are already trotting out the “blame the inanimate object” argument. As an example, here’s the Democrat governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, informing the public that ninety-three MILLION Americans are gunned down EVERY DAY:

An interesting note: the BernieBro opened fire with a rifle (I’ve not seen a description, but probably safe to assume it’s an AR-15) and fired *many* rounds… and yet, killed nobody. He was a *terrible* shot. These socialist whackos might think they’re going to start a new civil war but, man, I don’t think it’d turn out well for ’em.

Another rare piece of early Dyna Soar color art. This one shows the Dyna Soar heading to space atop the centaur upper stage of an Atlas booster. And if you think you are seeing corrugations on the back of the spaceplane, you are correct. At this stage in the design process the Dyna Soar *did* […]

So the media is currently ulcerating over Trump suggesting that he’d like to see NFL owners fire players who decide to disrespect the US flag & anthem before games. Here’s the thing: 1: It’s the players right to disrespect the flag, the anthem, the US. 2: It’s any citizens right to say that he’d like […]

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Argh. Facebook is not my favorite thing. But, apparently, it’s where all the cool kids hang out, so the Aerospace Projects Review Facebook page that I cobbled together years ago, I’ve started posting things in again. One of the weird things about Facebook is that you (apparently) can’t see a page unless you are signed […]

Oh, boy! Mayhem! A Group Of 62 Catholics Has Accused The Pope Of Spreading Heresy Not being Catholic, I have no dog in this fight. Still, it’s always entertaining when religious leaders tell other religious leaders they’re wrong. Wacky hijinks often ensue.

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… in a drone: This is pretty much exactly the sort of footage that would have been impossible to get prior to the current generation of drones. So just imagine what people will be able to film once the batteries for drones are actually *good,* with the power and energy density of chemical fuels like […]

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A deli worker was attacked, someone came across the counter and slashed at him with a knife. He fought back with a knife of his own, and the other guy got the worse of it. So, what happened? Did the city of New York throw the deli worker a ticker tape parade? Give him the […]